AMAZING GRACE is an unabashedly sentimental film and this is as it should be. It recounts the 15-year struggle of William Wilberforce to end the slave trade in the Britsh Empire at the end of the 18th century. Wilberforce and his followers were driven by sentiment, coupled with principle, to take on the big business… Read More »
ZODIAC (2007)
The pedestrian way to film the story of ZODIAC, the San Francisco Bay Area serial killer whose rampage extended from the late 1960s through the 1970s, would be to make a taut action thriller with snazzy directing tricks and gung-ho dialogue. Here was a psychopath who hunted people for sport and through a combination of smarts… Read More »
TALK TO ME
“Wake up, God damn it!” is how TALK TO ME begins and that’s exactly what is going to happen to its lead characters, the people in their orbit, and the entire city of Washington D.C. The story may be formulaic, albeit based on actual events, but stars Don Cheadle and Chiwetel Ejiofor take charge of… Read More »
EAT PRAY LOVE
EAT PRAY LOVE is a glossy travelogue of a flick, full of stereotypes and caricatures providing a colorful backdrop to Julia Roberts’ glamour lighting. Based on the book of the same name by Elizabeth Gilbert, it is the personal journey towards inner happiness taken by Liz (Julie Roberts) as she learns the lessons of the… Read More »
127 HOURS
Danny Boyle doesn’t make it easy for himself. After exploring the teeming slums of India with SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE, he’s turned in a different direction with 127 HOURS. In it, James Franco, as intrepid hiker Aron Ralston, spends most of the film trapped in a sliver of a crevice carved very deep into one of the… Read More »
HITCHCOCK
The splendid thing about HITCHCOCK is that it doesn’t just aspire to tell the story behind the making of PSYCHO. No, this wickedly endearing effort takes on the man, and the mythos behind the man, and then, for good measure, the woman behind both that made them legendary. Based on Stephen Rebello’s book, Alfred Hitchcock… Read More »
SOMETIMES IN APRIL
In SOMETIMES IN APRIL, Raoul Peck (Lumumba), has taken the specific story of the Rwandan genocide of April 1994 and made manifest the universal implications of the events. There is plenty of culpability to go around and Peck is not shy about pointing fingers, but he is also not shy about pointing up the greater… Read More »
Richard Curtis Captures PIRATE RADIO
Richard Curtis had more than just multiple story lines to juggle with PIRATE RADIO, he also had a cast afloat on a boat that was at the mercy of the whims of the ocean. When we talked on October 21, 2009, the question of seasickness was inevitable. The real topic was music, and the revolutionary… Read More »
Richard Linklater Richard & Christian McKay on ME AND ORSON WELLES
ME AND ORSON WELLES is a fascinating glimpse of what it might have been like to work with Welles during his enfant terrible period. The film, interesting though the subject matter is, succeeds because of the way Christian McKay become Welles in all his brilliant, infuriating glory. The first thing I wanted to know when I talked… Read More »
Randal Keynes Explains CREATION
I spoke to Randal Keynes on January 18, 2010 just as a particularly strong Pacific storm hit San Francisco. You can hear it as we talk about the film adaptation of the book he wrote about his great-great grandfather, Charles Darwin, who caused a storm of a different kind when he published his still controversial… Read More »
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